"... Cusimano is undoubtedly a painter in the Surrealist line and one can find in his work a quantity of elements (mainly serial and assumed as a distinguishing badge) from the great school of which he is a continuer. But a feature that sets him apart from the maximum archetypes of the movement initiated by Breton, and by Soupault with his fundamental text Les champs magnetiques (1919), is the absence of irony.
Cusimano observes and dreams the world with wide-eyed seriousness, he gets lost in it unsmiling. His sole distance from this world is that between the brush and the canvas. Irony implies an attitude of superiority towards what one portrays, whereas Cusimano puts himself on the same plane as his creatures, his mysterious objects, or rather he looks at them as if spellbound by their own enigmatic presence. His gift as an essentially lyric painter lies also in this relative ingenuousness.
As an eloquent example of this, one could take a painting like Romantic Harmony (1966), in which a chalice set on a sort of altar enclosed in a niche seems to emit roses and rose-leaves against a luminously unreal sky. But what kind of lyricism is at issue here? Not an inert lyricism, that is for sure;
rather, I would say, a decidedly erotic lyricism, "darkened" by a mystico-religious element. Here Surrealist heraldry (in an absolutely non-blasphemous key) overlaps with alchemical heraldry in which, as we know, erotic impulses become sublimated into a species of ceremonial and iconic paralysis.
Cusimano's eroticism makes use of various stylistic features of the Surrealist school, but judiciously. Mockery and desacration are not among his muses..."
Mario Lunetta
